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Can't get automatic cleanup to work

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Hi!  I'm successfully creating incremental backups but I can't get the automatic cleanup to work.  My settings create a full version after every 5 incremental versions, and I backup daily, so every 6 days I have a full version and five incremental versions.  That's working fine, but eventually my backup drive is completely full after about six weeks because no automatic cleanup is occurring.

I tried using several different old version cleanup rules:

- Delete version chains older than 5 days

- Store no more than 3 recent version chains

But in both cases, the backups just keep coming and no versions are getting automatically deleted.

Any suggestions?

 

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Paul, welcome to these public User Forums.

Automatic cleanup should work correctly with your settings as shown in your image but this will depend on you having sufficient free space on your backup drive too.

When you select to 'Store no more than 3 recent version chains' then your backup drive needs to have sufficient free space for all those files (3 x full, plus 15 x incremental) plus room still for one further full backup file.  This is because Acronis will not remove the oldest version chain files (1 x full plus 5 x incr) until after the next chain has been started with a successful full backup.

If you are running out of space on the backup drive, then use the Clean up versions tool to remove the oldest, unwanted chain files manually.

Your second image of the cleanup tool shows that there is a Full chain from 11/27/2019 missing which may be contributing to the issues with automatic cleanup.  Try deleting that missing chain along with others in that section to free up sufficient free space to continue with automatic cleanup.

I'm having a similar problem with Acronis 2020. I do a full backup daily & have my auto cleanup settings to delete files older than 7 days, but nothing is being deleted. When I invoke the cleanup tool, it only lists the six most recent backup files, yet if you see the screenshot of my backup files, there are 31!

I have been using Acronis for 10 years & I usually upgrade annually. I have had this same issue at times over the years.

William, welcome to these public User Forums.

Sorry but no screenshot is shown for your post above, plus more information is needed on what your Backup Scheme settings are configured for?

As mentioned previously, automatic cleanup based on age only starts counting from when a new Full backup has been created.  The count can also be reset if changes are made to these settings.

It has been so long since I posted here that I forgot what I did to resolve this, but it has been resolved.

William, no problem, for some reason the forum software is sending out notifications about some very old topic posts today as I have seen in my own inbox!!

Thanks Steve, you solved my problem.  As you noted, the oldest chain isn't deleted until after the next full backup.  I didn't have room for four full backups, so I changed my selection to 'Store no more than 2 recent version chains'.  Now the third full backup completes successfully, then the oldest chain is deleted immediately afterwards, leaving two full backups.  So in order to use 'Store no more than N recent version chains', I needed to have enough room on my backup media for N+1 full version chains.  Thanks so much!    

Paul, glad to have helped and good that the issue is solved!